


Warmth of Home

by Aithilin



Series: Nyx Ulric Appreciation Week 2020 [7]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Nyx Ulric Appreciation, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:20:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24955192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/pseuds/Aithilin
Summary: Nyx had always thought of "home" as a very specific place. He never expected that to change.
Relationships: Noctis Lucis Caelum/Nyx Ulric
Series: Nyx Ulric Appreciation Week 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794022
Comments: 7
Kudos: 44





	Warmth of Home

The concept of home had always been a real, defined location for him. 

Home was the family home back in Galahd that had been a haven standing against the curfews and patrols of MTs. Home was the blossoming gardens his mother had tended to with an almost religious fervour, lullabies and folk songs filling the summer air as she managed her flowers. Home was the pile of fresh laundry that waited for him when he stumbled in— exhausted— at four in the morning, having closed the bar down and spent longer than necessary figuring out his accounts and orders because he and Libertus were too stubborn to ask for help. 

Home was the little waterfront market, that had been the site of a military landing. Where the resistance to the Nif occupation had come to a head on a sunny afternoon when he had finally taken a day off to spend helping around the house. 

Home was the quiet little memorial in his mother’s garden; a smaller one carried and built in his own apartment, where he had laid Selena’s favourite flowers on her birthday every year. 

He had always thought of Galahd when thinking of home. That house, that garden, the broken little world he had left behind after he had his first taste of Lucian magic and dreamed of an equally broken and tired revenge. He had always imagined the day he would see that colourful garden again and hear the familiar songs filling the air with the peaceful hum of summer insects. 

“For hearth and home.”

It was a mantra when he felt the Lucian fire burning through him. When he collapsed after a night-long battle to defend a Wall that had never protected what he held dearest. It was a promise to go home. 

“I’m just staying close to home this time.”

Libertus had given him a sour-lemon look the first time he let it slip that the run down little apartment he had taken to was “home.” Crowe had missed the change, Pelna couldn’t care less, Libertus didn’t give voice to his displeasure until it happened again. And again. 

Nyx wasn’t thinking of it any more. 

“It’s not like this is my home,” Nyx justified, indicating the four walls around them— the concrete box with the warm patches in the floor and a constant chill through the small window above the bed. “It’s just...”

“An apartment, I know.”

“Galahd is home,” he would insist, sounding weaker and weaker as time went on. “Insomnia is just...”

“A place, I know.”

Nyx didn’t know when he started looking forward to getting back to that little apartment in that noisy corner of the city. When he started thinking of the winding roads through the sprawling city as the route home. When he started thinking of it as something more than just a place to settle down here and there, between trips out to a war zone to fight someone else’s battles while he waited on a promise that he could go home. 

He wasn’t certain when the city had become more than just a place. 

“I’d take you home, you know,” Nyx said one night when the noise outside had started to dim. He was busy making Selena’s favourite treats in his little kitchen— a soft and flavoured sweet bread that no one in the city seemed to get right— when he said it. “To Galahd, to meet my mother.”

He didn’t know when he had started up differentiate between ‘real’ home and whatever he thought his life in Lucis was. But he knew that he had started to think of Noctis— sitting in his favourite chair, picking through the last of their shared dinner as he watched the flourish of baking— as a new sort of home. 

“Not going to lie, hero, that sounds terrifying.”

“She’s terrifying when she wants to be,” Nyx smiled as he kneaded dough on his counter, the pink colouring of the strawberry flavouring becoming a more even blend as he worked it, The dough a smooth and familiar bowl. “But she’d love you. You don’t cause trouble and you’re shy.”

The chocolate buns were baking now, started earlier, before dinner to fill the air with a warmth that Nyx had used to savour. He had used his mother’s old tricks for this batch— shaped the buns together with little twists and pinches until chocolate and vanilla met in the cute images of his childhood treats— to give some sort of flare he knew would impress Noctis. Cute little ears and pudgy round heads a little misshapen from years without practise for the technique. Little tricks and smells and movements of his hands through the dough that reminded him of what a home really was. 

His home was sitting on his favourite chair, illuminated by the glow of the familiar cartoons, licking sauce from his fingers as he balanced a bowl of skewers on his lap. The leftovers of dinner getting colder by the moment and threatening to drip with each precarious second. 

His home was there, smiling and wreathed in the familiar warmth of everything Nyx knew made a real home worth coming back to.


End file.
